Examining Peak Oil Websites

The internet is such a vast, unforgiving animal that diligent students need training on indentifying information that is actually valuable, or information that isn’t valuable and is just spewed out on the internet. John R. Henderson has a tutorial that is a series of exercises that train students to sift through information on the World Wide Web. Peak oil is a hot-button topic that has such a large impact on the economy and the well-being on the planet. Henderson’s exercise gives us five websites to observe and decide whether the information is credible and which information is not.

The first website was an article about the peak oil situation. The layout of the website seemed juvenile, even though the website was an .org, which merits some legitimacy, I had doubts on how credible this website is. While there is an RSS feed on the sidebar, the rest of the website is simple. Simple colors of black and burnt yellow and a list of links on the left sidebar was suspicious, I don’t want to brag but with a few hours I might be able to create the same exact website. I did not find the information to be credible.

The second website, was a website that posted topics about the dangers of peak oil. Smack dab in the center of the page was a chart that showed the BCD comparison. Charts! Everyone loves charts! However, I was still skeptical. It seems like the website is designed solely to take down the oil business, making them biased. The sidebars include a blog roll and a button to donate, I did not find the information at this website to be valuable.

The third website had a 404 error message. Alas, errors. Based on the previous two websites, I probably wouldn’t have found this information credible.

The fourth website, was a news article. Brilliant! Some information I can actually find valuable! The Huffington Post article was written to educate readers about the danger of peak oil. The reason I found this information valuable was because it came from a credible source. Any sort of publication whether it be the New York Times, Huffington Post, etc has to be valid because people are being paid to write these stories, and not to plagiarize. Also, the content is for the world to read, not for someone who accidentally stumbles upon a website.

The fifth website, was another article. However, this article was from the information-clearing house, which doesn’t seem like a credible news source to me. The website layout was less attractive than all of the other websites. There was the article posted in the center, and there was no information on the sidebars for navigation. It almost seemed like another persons blog. Even though this article seemed to have boundless information and was inundated with statistics, I just couldn’t find the information credible. Especially not with one of the titles of the website saying “news you won’t find on CNN”. Is that because it isn’t actual news?

Henderson’s exercise was helpful, journalism students need to be well versed in spotting information that might not be valuable or credible. With all of the social media websites and regular people having access to a wealth of information at their fingertips, correctly identifying quality information is paramount.